uvm financial aid just charged me a 200 dollar late payment fee and put a hold on my student account. i was apparently supposed to pay a bill (which no one sent to me), with student loan funds (which no one informed me i had received or was even eligible for) which i was supposed to accept electronically or something. fascinating! maybe if financial aid didn't have their heads up each other's bureaucratic asses, all of this could have happened without charging me extra money for what appears to be absolutely no reason. way to go capitalism and private education!

i had to borrow flops's car to go to work today because i couldn't get my act together enough to put gas in mine and i was all late and shit. i've been so disorganized this summer, it's crazy. flops keeps his ipod in his car and we still have all this music on it from the 90s party we had a couple of weeks ago. so, this morning i rolled into work 20 minutes late in flops's ford explorer while singing along to 'black or white' by michael jackson really loud with all the windows down. that song is really ridiculous. everyone should go listen to it immedeately.

well, some mechanics fixed it and it cost me a whole pile of money. but it's fixed, which is cool. i also argued with a guy from class about sexism and patriarhcy. (what does everyone think the difference between those things is? does it matter? how does patriarhcy play out in men's lives? how does it relate to other froms of oppression?) actually this guy was kind of sucky and said problematic things, but the conversation was still interesting. and i made a narrative map of my life! (which is kind of a fancy way of saying that you figure out what values and preferred identities and truths are important to you and how you came to know that about yourself and plot all of that on a big chart). i think i want a narrative therapist. i don't really need one, but i want the attention.

a lot of awesome people are coming to visit in the next month! sam and brian and cannie packits and irningston latex barrier! i'm trying to think of crazy things we can do when you come, but i'm not that creative. i wouldn't expect too much.

someone hit my car in the parking lot of my apartment building and then drove away without leaving their information or taking any kind of resoponsibility for it. now it's gonna cost 500 dollars to fix it, and that really fucking sucks. i spent my whole day on the phone with claims adjustors and damage appraisors, and that really sucked too. this is another reason why we should all give up cars in favor of public transportation.

it's getting old. i come to class every week and have the same arguments with the same people. invariably, someone will make an essentializing comment about human nature, or say something racist or homophobic or fucked up in some other way. when they're called out on it they accuse people of unfairly 'politicizing the issue.' in their own lives, they're just not political people. whatever that means.

i'm working in the medical records department of a pediatric office for the summer. i did my social work internship there during the year. the way that the medical staff conceptualized and used social work always weirded me out. i'm filing charts today, and the the head male doctor takes me aside and says 'someone's crying in my office. i don't know anything about any of that. you go talk to her.' it's not that he values me or my skills (assuming i have any skills). this just isn't something he does. it's something i do, apparently. even though i finished my internship there three months ago and i'm not actually allowed to do any social work related things until the next academic year. liability issues and all that. so i follow him to his office and hear the whole life story of a person' i've never met. he never asks her to speak to her own experience. he definitely never asks her if it's cool for me to hear all of this personal shit. the whole thing is really gendered and gross.

i feel like the school shit and the work shit is definitely connected. people run around thinking their lives are apolitical and that the personal decisions they make have no political consequences. systemic issues are compartmentalized into individual grievances so that they're no longer anyone else's concern. each of these things grounds the other and creates space for the other to exist. right? i'm definitely complicit in all this, too. i'm spending a whole shitload of money to get my msw when i could have given it away. the fact that i could find the money to spend in the first place says something. how do i have transparent relationships with people when my consumption habits and the crazy privilege i have when i move through the world is responsible for a lot of the shit that they're going through?

so, the other day i met chase for lunch and i was eating this enormous burrito. it was amazing and i was really excited about it. all of a sudden, after i had taken a few bites, the whole thing completely exploded all over me! a tidal wave of black beans and salsa all over my face. "there's no way i can eat this burrito now," i exclaimed. "whatever shall i do?"then flopsy suggested that instead of eating the burrito with my hands as a self-contained unit as i was originally planning, i should just get a plate and use a knife and fork. my meal was saved (not to mention the improvement in my table manners!)

as flopsy later pointed out, my problem was burrito functional fixedness. if you insist that burrito is a concrete thing and can only conceptualize it in one way, then you're screwed when it explodes all over your face. but if you expand your definition of burrito to include other things too, there are way more possibilities. and then you're a lot more likely to avoid having a shitty lunch. or something. maybe i'm taking this burrito way too seriously.